Daily Check-in
One of the biggest challenges when it comes to working with remote teams is how do you keep an eye on progress and catch potential blockers without having too many meet-ups or sync?
One way which Basecamp achieves this is by having what is called “Automatic Check-ins” where each day a question is posed to the team “What did you work on today?” And this gives a good indication on what is happening and if you notice someone is missing you can personally chase them up and see if there are any issues.
Ingredients
- Software — Slack
The General Process
Below is a rough guide of how the process would be.
- At around 4:00pm (16:00) each day an automatic message is sent to a channel asking “What did you work on today?“
2. Each team member has no pressure to respond to the question straight away but it should ideally be done that day
- The „check-in“ can be as short or as long as you want
3. The next morning a short review should be done on the check-ins and the following should be asked:
- Are we all heading in the right direction?
- Are there any blockers which I can help facilitate?
- Is anyone or any topic missing?
4. Ideally, you should chase up anything on a personal basis and not with the whole channel or team
Things to Remember
Are are some pointers to remember with this action.
- This isn‘t a tool for controlling, but just for informing
- There is no „blame game“ to be played with the process
- Any discrepancies should be chased up on an individual basis in a form of coaching and mentoring
- It might be just a single bullet point someone is working on, that’s perfectly ok
How to Implement
Here are some basic instructions on how to implement the Daily Check-in via the messaging system you are using currently
Slack
They have a good way of doing this utilising the “reminders” feature and they have detailed that here: https://slack.com/intl/en-de/slack-tips/run-daily-standups-or-check-ins?eu_nc=1
Recommendation — Create a specific channel called #check-in for example and this way the information is not lost and gives a good go to area.
- Create a new channel called “#check-in”
- Go to that channel and type (or copy and paste the following) the following
- /remind #check-in Hey everyone @channel, what did you work on today? Every weekday at 16:00
3. Press Enter
